Please visit me in book prison

Playwright Joe Orton went to prison for doctoring library books in a humorous fashion with text changes and photos, as that’s how the UK did things in the 1960s. Book criminals ended up behind bars. Library staff went under cover, and sent Orton, and his partner Kenneth Halliwell, a sting letter about an illegally parked car. The typeface of their reply was matched against the doctored books and they were convicted, then damming evidence of glue and magazine cut-outs were found at their home.

Luckily, the fact I ‘re-homed’ some more Companion Book Club books today is unlikely to see me doing any time in the ‘big house’, and if I’m honest, although carelessly stored and ignored, they weren’t actually about to be thrown away, unlike before. Although one of them is so warped and bloated with damp, it will need medical attention in my airing cupboard, so if anything, I’m saving it.

One of the books I’m really not interested in (I love horses but not show jumping), but like a lazy-eyed orphan or the ugliest dog in the shelter, I had to take it home. I couldn’t take it’s friends, it’s family, those who it had lived with probably since the 1950s, and leave it there alone, with no one but Jilly Cooper and Barbara Taylor Bradford to keep it company.

Top left, touch of the George Formbys!

If this is how Edward and Wallis really look today, a better embalmer than me had a hand in it.

I also once had a dog we called ‘Windy’, although it was a description, not a name.

They really are lovely books. They feel like time travel, like reading magazines from the time, and make me want to put some rollers in my hair and get a tweed jacket to wear with feminine but sensible heels 🙂